Although the literature on life event scaling is more than a decade long, there has not been conclusive proof that weighted life event indices are superior to unweighted counts of life events in predicting health status. This lack of conclusive evidence is due in part to psychometric and statistical properties of existing lists of scaled life events that result in very high correlations between all life event indices including unweighted indices. While prediction of health changes from life events might or might not suffer from this situation, the conceptual analysis of life events certainly does suffer. In the proposed research a procedure for differentiating life event scales will be developed using a heterogeneous list of life events. Scales of "change," "desirability," and the extent to which occurrence of events can be controlled will be tested with regard to the prediction of psychological demoralization. In addition, procedures will be developed for the comparison of life event scale scores obtained from different populations and these procedures will be applied to life event scale scores obtained in New York, El Paso and Jerusalem.